Learning Path Recommendation Enhanced by Knowledge Tracing and Large Language Model

With the development of large language model (LLM) technology, AI-assisted education systems are gradually being widely used. Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) is an important task in personalized instructional scenarios. AI-assisted LPR is gaining traction for its ability to generate learning content based on a student’s personalized needs. However, the native-LLM has the problem of hallucination, which may lead to the inability to generate learning content; in addition, the evaluation results of the LLM on students’ knowledge status are usually conservative and have a large margin of error. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel approach for LPR enhanced by knowledge tracing (KT) and LLM. Our method operates in a “generate-and-retrieve” manner: the LLM acts as a pedagogical planner that generates contextual reference exercises based on the student’s needs. Subsequently, a retrieval mechanism constructs the concrete learning path by retrieving the top-N most semantically similar exercises from an established exercise bank, ensuring the recommendations are both pedagogically sound and practically available. The KT plays the role of an evaluator in the iterative process. Rather than generating semantic instructions directly, it provides a quantitative and structured performance metric. Specifically, given a candidate learning path generated by the LLM, the KT model simulates the student’s knowledge state after completing the path and computes a knowledge promotion score. This score quantitatively measures the effectiveness of the proposed path for the current student, thereby guiding the refinement of subsequent recommendations. This iterative interaction between the KT and the LLM continuously refines the candidate learning items until an optimal learning path is generated. Experimental validations on public datasets demonstrate that our model surpasses baseline methods.